Lester's notsogrand adventure
by bhut
Summary: With Nick and others unavailable, Lester goes to investigate a time anomaly on his own. Between the Jurassic dinosaurs and Helen Cutter, he may be quite over his head. Season 3 spoilers.


**Lester's not-so-grand adventure**

_All characters belong to Impossible Pictures._

The procession that made its way through the ARC's hallway draw the stares of practically every member of the staff, including Nick Cutter and his crew: after all, it isn't everyday that the head panjandrum, James Lester himself, would be leading a military team – and judging from the smell, this team had come forth straight from the sewers. That, and the fact that one of the soldiers was being covered on a stretcher, obviously quite alive, but hurt equally as seriously, was enough to make all the assembled people to realize that today had been no ordinary day for the ARC's leader.

As usual, it was Nick Cutter who took the lead in asking his superior (bureaucratically speaking) about what was going on.

James Lester gave the other man a stare that would make the basilisk from the Chamber of Mysteries look like a toad, and turned to his other main subordinate, Captain Becker.

"Captain," he said in a voice that clearly suggested that only years of impeccable and unshakable political training prevented Lester from turning onto Cutter like the abovementioned basilisk onto Harry Potter with genuinely similar intent, "please tell professor Cutter about our day, including, I suppose, your thoughts and opinions regarding his wife, or his ex-wife, or whoever Dr. Helen is in relation to him, got it? Or should I make it into an order instead?"

"Now, there's no need to be rude," the new leader of ARC's military forces muttered back, clearly discomfited by Lester's last remark. "If professor would be so kind-"

"Just what had happened today?" Nick snapped, the fiery side of his Scottish temper coming to the front, brought on, as usual, by the mention of his ex-wife. "Lester, what had Helen done?"

"It was she hadn't done – and she hadn't done what you probably think that she did," Becker tried to explain, but upon seeing Nick's rapidly purpling face and Lester's own angrily flushed one, changed his tactics and began to rapidly tell about today's misbegotten events.

...It had started innocently enough, with most of the ARC's staff away on various Christmas or Hanukah or Kwanza or whatever holidays, and only few select members were on watchmen duty, being mostly occupied with keeping an eye or an ear out for the time anomaly alarm, finally back online after several days of hard work by Connor Temple. The only exemption – for real – was James Lester himself, busy interviewing the latest newcomer to the ARC team - Captain Becker.

"As you are ought to understand, captain," the civil servant was explaining to the military man, "the hours of the ARC are non-standard and practically entirely dependent on the anomaly alarm that you can see is currently inactive-"

If James Lester had been cueing his speech, he wouldn't be able to ask for a better time for the alarm to activate, sounding its sirens all over the ARC. Conversely, though, it could have been far worse, if there'd been more people at the ARC at that hour – their current numbers essentially prevented them from running around like a crowd of headless chickens, allowing Lester some saving grace in the current situation.

"Well! As you can see," Lester continued as smoothly as he could, with missing nary a beat, "we just have had your first time anomaly alarm. I daresay that we will be able to scrounge up some of your new underlings and investigate it on our own."

"Wouldn't we need scientists of some sort?" Becker's own attitude was rather more sceptical than Lester's own. "In case we need to figure out what the new critter in question is?"

"Nonsense," Lester shook his head, even as he attentively looked over the map of London that showed the new site of the time anomaly. "I know this place, we had trouble there before – however, since the trouble in question consisted of just some giant spiders and centipedes, I believe that we will be able to take them on without professor Cutter's experienced entomological expertise. Still," Lester paused, "tell the men to take supplies of anti-venom with us. Some of the vermin that we may encounter may be poisonous to humans after all."

Becker looked somewhat sceptically at Lester, but the military habit of following his superiors' lead was too strongly ingrained into him, and consequently he nodded in agreement and went to get the soldiers present on the ARC, telling them to prepare to encounter some poisonous insects. Later on, these preparations would turn into a grotesque joke, but back then it sounded as good advice, as a matter of fact...

...When the small – fewer than two dozen troops – group of soldiers with Lester in the lead arrived at the spot where the time anomaly supposedly was located, Lester's certainty about this being another prehistoric bug infestation grew. This branch of the subway had been closed-off for some time now, not because of the time anomaly opening there in the first time, but due to some urban renovation project. Urban renovation being what it was, this meant that that particular area had been out of operation for a long while, consequently falling into profound disuse, and even more so, the place was so cluttered with all sort of debris and mould, that walking around it was simply disturbing.

On the other hand, it was that debris and mould that gave Lester the first re-assurance that they were on the right track. It was always warmer underground, even during an English winter, but as he and his men moved down the branch, the temperature grew ridiculously, almost subtropically warm, and the mouldy debris got replaced by pieces of rusted or corroded metal covered in mosses and plants that looked like tiny ferns. Insects – not just spiders or centipedes – but real, insects with wings – flew from wall to wall to ceiling or to floor, all of which began to resemble more and more not a man-made tunnel, but a real cavern. Since this was a subway tunnel – at least initially – there were several lesser tunnels branching away on both left and right, but no one in Lester's force felt a need to go in there or investigate.

But even in the main tunnel, as Lester resolutely led his force through it, there were now clear signs that this was not what Lester had expected it to be – besides flying insects (and spiders, and centipedes – but all much smaller than the ones infesting the subway) there were also small frog-like creatures, and various salamanders, and possibly even a lizard or too. Furthermore, the plants grew increasingly tall and luxuriant and there was increasingly more water underfoot as well.

"Mr. Lester?" Becker finally decided to remind his leader that while subordination was a fine thing, it also went in both ways. "What is going on? The insects around here aren't the size that you have talked about-.

A loud, bird-like squawk interrupted what Lester was about to say as a smallish, reptilian head with a crest of feather-like scales emerged from the ferns and glared at the party in a rather forbidding way.

Lester was the first one to recover, as the creature didn't seem to be interesting in doing anything more than to hoot in an apparently warning way. "Well, that is unexpected," he muttered, even as he re-adjusted his tie. "Cutter told me that giant vermin were before the dinosaurs-"

"-and they are, you bureaucratic buffoon," Helen Cutter appeared out of the surrounding darkness in her usual ghostly manner. "This is the Jurassic time period – the giant insects and spiders are long gone, but the dinosaurs are just nearing their zenith. Where's Nick to explain it to you, Lester?"

"_Professor Cutter_ is busy elsewhere tonight," Lester said coldly, as he vividly remembered Helen's role in Leek's failed power coup, and had no intention of letting her get away without a fight. "You two," he gestured to the nearest soldiers, "stop her!"

The two men moved forwards, momentarily forgetting about the dinosaur. That was to be a mistake, as the bird-like reptile suddenly sprinted forwards, jumping onto the nearest man, and starting to maul him in the shoulders, neck and face before anyone else could react.

Surprisingly, Helen reacted and reached the struggling man before anyone else did. Or rather – she reached for the dinosaur that the man was struggling with, and expertly grabbed it by its' throat and forelimbs, putting a choking hold onto it. Within moments, the bird-like reptile stopped struggling and went slack, and Helen Cutter proceeded to tie it up, not unlike a chicken. And then she looked at the others, who were just beginning to make sense out of what had happened and glared at them. "Somebody, get this man wrapped-up or something, before it gets worse," she spoke in a tone that implied that she thought that all others were idiots. "Now, before it gets worse."

As the fallen soldier's partner and other man began to follow Helen's suggestions, exchanging sheepish looks between themselves and their team mates, Becker and Lester got down to Helen's eye level and looked at her.

"What is that thing exactly?" Becker decided to ask a safer question first.

"A dinosaur – not a coelophysis, but one of its later descendants, just don't ask me which one. There are at least three different species running around back in those particular millennia of the Jurassic as a whole, and unlike Nick I do not enough about dinosaurs to fully distinguish one from another. And that brings me to the next topic on the agenda – eggs."

"Whose eggs?"

"Hers. And her mate's," Helen explained, as she briefly retreated into a side tunnel, before returning from it, carrying another, similar dinosaur on her back. "There are approximately a dozen of them in the ferns over there, almost ready to hatch. Since I am going to blow up the tunnel to shut down the time anomaly, I figure that you would want to take this family to your center in order to promote funding or whatever."

Becker blinked. "Why are you blowing up the tunnel? This is a unique opportunity – tell her, Mr. Lester."

"I agree," Lester said flatly, looking at the other two with an almost equal distaste. "Why can't we seal-off the tunnel instead? It worked last time."

"Ah, yes. The one leading to the future," Helen nodded calmly. "You would have poured cement over an open time anomaly, and thus has contaminated the future with it."

"With what?"

"Cement. It would have poured through the time anomaly and into the future. Thank someone that you Leek do it, and I was able to persuade Leek not to use any cement, but rather let me handle the shutting of the time anomaly."

"But there were no explosions."

"No. But that time anomaly wasn't contaminated by anything either."

"Contaminated?" Lester blinked.

"No significant amount of material was able to stay for a prolonged amount of time, pardon the pun, which would have enabled the time anomaly to remain open permanent. For as long as there is, say, dinosaurs in the present, or modern people in the Jurassic, the time anomaly would remain open, and in time – again, pardon the pun – it would affect an ever greater area on the contaminated side. This whole site is still so rather restricted only because it is underground, man-made. If this was a natural cavern complex, or even an open space in the city, by now the spread of the Jurassic through the present would have been felt much more strongly on a much greater area much quicker than it is now."

Lester and Becker exchanged glances. "That's ridiculous!" Lester erupted. "Time does not-"

"Don't tell me what's ridiculous!" Helen grabbed the bureaucrat by the collar and gave pulled him uprights without too much effort. "Look and see for yourself! Over there is the time anomaly, an opening into the Pangaea of the Late Jurassic, complete with giant sauropod dinosaurs and the carnivores that hunt them. You have come here from the present, Holocene London, where...well, I don't really need to explain, now do I? And here is the place where the Jurassic is leaking into the Holocene if you want to get technical, and I dare you prove me wrong!"

"But how does it work? Technically speaking?" Lester gasped.

Abruptly, Helen released Lester with an almost embarrassed look on her face. "Look, technically speaking it is such a complex process that even I, after eight years of studying it cannot describe in a fully technical terms just what is happening here – 'leaking' and 'contamination' are the best terms I can come up with – sad, really. But, on a less terminological point, there's already enough food to sustain these dinosaurs while the allosaurus mother on the other side of the time anomaly hatches her own brood and leaves, enabling them to leave this place as well."

"The allosaurus?" Lester said weakly.

"Yeah. An allosaurus, the T-Rex of the Jurassic. Five times bigger, longer and heavier than these two, quite faster too, especially on short distances, and when it is guarding and hatching its eggs its' maternal instincts and ferocity go into an overdrive, believe me – and these two egg- and hatching-eaters are the perfect catalysts for that allosaurus go berserk."

"The T-Rex of the Jurassic," it was Becker's turn to blink.

"Yeah," Helen shrugged, looking somewhat uncomfortable. "Quicker on its feet, less robust, and with much more efficient foreclaws – unlike the Rex, this angry mother could disembowel you with just one lucky blow. You do not want to go there." Helen shook her head in seemingly genuine concern. "Anyways, the thing is that these smaller dinos are like birds, they got homing instinct or something, and if a place works, they will nest here time and again. This act would increase the influx of the Jurassic into the modern London, and that is something that Lester here doesn't want, correct?"

"Well, yes," Lester said with a wary look. "But why don't you want it? Cutter back at the ARC claims that you want to alter the future and this seems a very good way to do so."

"You and Nick are bonding? That's so sweet," Helen's voice was anything but. "Well, maybe you can tell him about your ex-girlfriend in return. I'm sure Nick'll appreciate it."

Lester blinked. "My ex-girlfriend? What do you know about her?"

"Anyways," Helen shook her head. "My point is that rather having it all drown in cement, I would do it quickly and easily."

"I am afraid that I cannot allow you to do that," Becker shook his head.

"Oh? Captain, the effects of the time anomaly will soon reach the active part of the tube and then it won't be so easy to conceal anymore."

"Yes ma'am, we fully understand that," Becker nodded back equally solemnly. "However, we're in charge of it, not you." He paused to see if Helen was challenging him, but the time traveller was just looking at him in a curious way, so he continued. "Furthermore, if worse comes to worse, we'll blow this place up ourselves – and we're professionals at doing that, you're not."

"And doesn't Lester over there have any say in your sentence?"

"We'll talk about it at the ARC – I'd invite you too, but obviously..."

"Fair enough," Helen nodded in reply, as she turned to leave. "Two last warnings, captain. Firstly, I am not your friend, and so do not expect our future conversations to be as civil as this one. And secondly, that land in time would become a part of the USA, not England, so you better watch your step, or you'll create an international incident on top of everything else that you have or will have. That is all."

"Acknowledge," Becker nodded, as Helen quietly vanished into a side tunnel. No one tried to stop her, but Lester turned to his new unruly subordinate, clearly determined to give him a piece of his mind.

"Sir, not here," Becker forestalled the upcoming rant. "She's quite good and may be listening in on us as we speak. Let's discuss this back at the ARC, where professor Cutter – the other professor Cutter, I suppose – will be present to give us good advice."

..."And so we returned here, after leaving about a dozen people guarding the place," Becker finished, as Lester seethed quietly. "And professor, sorry to drop this on you so soon after the Christmas celebrations, but if you and your team would go there with us next time to estimate and double-check what your ex-wife told us, well..." he trailed off, clearly uncomfortable talking about it.

"Of course, but isn't it Lester's call?" Nick said, hesitantly.

"Nick, everybody, about that," Jenny began, hesitant and shaky herself, but with a somewhat impish look in her eyes all the same. "Before our little private Christmas get together, I received a memo that I was supposed to tell you, but I guess I forgot-"

At that moment, the entrance door to the ARC opened wide and in walked another woman, one that was so very painfully familiar to one of the ARC's members.

"Mr. Lester – you have been demoted," Jenny finished with a semi-concealed smirk.

"Hello, James," the newcomer nodded coolly, a wicked smirk of her own barely concealed on her lips. "Long time no see, eh?"

James Lester's anguished cry shook the snow of ARC's roof.

**End.**


End file.
